A year into her fixing career, Elif guiltily felt like her job was to use people, to subject them to journalists’ interrogations and dehumanize them as mere bits of information. She felt exploitative in a general way when pressuring strangers into talking with her clients, but experienced a particularly knotted anxiety when introducing foreign reporters to people she knew and cared for.

South of the border, Karim was unknowingly starting down his own path as a fixer. He was from the Syrian capital Damascus but grew up partly in the United Arab Emirates, where his father was a businessman and where English is more the lingua franca than Arabic. Karim returned to Syria in the early 2000s to study economics at university and then start a job at a luxury hotel. He would sometimes lead VIP guests around on tours, learning both to charm foreigners and to objectify and neatly package Syria for them.

José also covered the siege of Kobani. The young reporter was now a stringer: he had an informal agreement to regularly provide content to an American news website, which even provided him a modest travel and expense budget when the story was big enough. The Kobani story was huge, and in October José headed to the border with an Istanbul fixer named Zeynep. Elif was his first choice, but she was already engaged by XYZ. The channel paid her more than José could dream to. José chose Zeynep next because, though not Kurdish herself, she was a leftist grad student activist who seemed to strike the right insider-outsider balance for the story.

As a specialist in stories about Afghans in Turkey, Habib had to reconcile his clients’ prescription that sources freely and individually consent to interviews with the power that organized crime held over migrants. Human smugglers could make Habib’s job harder or easier. They could secure or corrupt his reputation among reporters as a fixer for Turkey’s Afghan community.

Fixers bridge the gap between reporters and sources with a range of matchmaking, coaching, and transcoding tools. Their capacity and freedom to unify reporters and sources and control information and story frames are constrained, however, by those brokered parties’ perceptions of them, the presence of alternative pathways of communication that circumvent them, the limits of their expertise and social capital, and the magnitude of conflict between parties.

Michael wanted to do the Alevi story. I wrote to Özge, asking if she could help us with contacts for a visit to Okmeydanı, the Alevi neighborhood in central Istanbul where fighting had occurred in recent days.

After fleeing Damascus, first for Antakya and then to Istanbul after ISIS threatened him, Karim cobbled together a living from fixing gigs. Orhan had connected him with his first reporters, and Karim continued to sub-fix for Orhan on occasion. He also began to recruit clients of his own. Karim knew from his luxury hotel days how to hang out with foreigners, how to play the coolly exotic Syrian and not the desperate or aggressive one, and proved entrepreneurial in using journalist parties to meet potential clients and reduce his dependence on Orhan.

I often met Orhan at a bustling coffee shop in Beşiktaş, a secularist-leftist enclave on Istanbul’s European side. He called the café his office. Our conversations were continually interrupted by his acquaintances stopping in for a coffee or passing on the street, but he seemed to thrive in the chaos. Orhan was in his late 30s when I got to know him, a decade and a half older than me and much cooler, dressed most days in a rock concert tee-shirt and ripped jeans.

Elif spent a few days covering the siege of Kobani from Suruç, where, she admitted, “I felt totally like a stranger.” She traveled to the border with a TV crew from XYZ, which had become her main employer. It was Elif’s first Syria-related story and just her second time in Turkey’s southeast.

Nur’s services were in even higher demand in 2015. Perhaps the deepest ambivalence of fixers: thriving business is correlated to calamity. Reporters are drawn to events that destroy sources’ lives. It can be hard to keep up a performance of objectivity and professionalism for clients while sharing sources’ experience of suffering.

I met Michael at his hotel in Beyoğlu on Monday morning. He asked me over coffee about Turkish politics and my research. He was filling in for the newspaper’s regular Turkey correspondent, who had mistimed her vacation. Michael had reported in Turkey on a couple previous occasions (his usual fixer was already booked) but did not have detailed knowledge of the country. He asked very general questions about contemporary politics and Fethullah Gülen, whom the government had already named as the coup attempt’s mastermind. I characterized the Gülen Movement as a wide network with a conspiratorial side but with many affiliates engaged in nothing more sinister than teaching math to children.

Elif and José continued to work together occasionally. After a couple of years of painful lessons about what stories would and would not sell, José secured a “string” with a syndicated news website, an informal agreement that they would accept his work on an ongoing basis, even though he was still paid per article as a freelancer. This arrangement allowed him to focus on one article at a time with the confidence that he would be paid, if often belatedly and only after complaints to the editor. As a stringer, José could also sometimes expense Elif’s fees instead of paying them out of pocket. She would type up a receipt for “translation services” for him to forward along to the editor.

Several of our protagonists’ careers underwent great change over the 2010s. Yet I have argued that when we zoom out, we see that continuous individual-level changes are a part of a larger stability, a dynamic equilibrium in the field of international journalism.

Part II looks at the position of fixers within the larger field of journalism. The newsmaking process can be understood as a series of mediations between successive contributors along a chain that stretches from local sources all the way to foreign audiences. “Fixers,” “translators,” “producers,” and others engage in similar journalistic activities along that chain, but news contributors nonetheless draw – and police – important distinctions among these various labels. To rise in status above “translators” and perhaps be recognized as “producers,” fixers try to present themselves as objective professionals and avoid the appearance of local allegiances. Yet local connections are, paradoxically, also their greatest asset for serving client reporters’ needs. Through accounts of reporting on events from the 2014 Soma mine disaster to the Syrian and Afghan refugee crises in Turkey, these chapters illustrate fixers’ ambiguous place in journalism’s hierarchical division and their efforts to claim high-status roles and labels.

In her first year after university graduation, working as a fixer in the Kurdish-majority city of Diyarbakır, Nur more or less followed the formula of her first fixing adventure with Alison. She would introduce visiting reporters and academics to her friends, to Kurdish Movement activists and intellectuals and cultural revivalists, to people she wanted to talk with herself. Her clients were also interested in talking to these people but considered her more of an activist than a professional fixer. She would often end up surprised and disappointed to find articles that reporters had published without showing her a draft or sending her a link, articles that went against her guidance and understanding of an issue.

In this Introduction, we meet two fixer–reporter teams who cover the same event – a terrorism attack in Istanbul – in very different ways. Fixers are news contributors who assist foreign reporters by arranging, translating, and otherwise mediating between them and local news sources. Depending on a fixer’s background, aspirations, and relationship with their client reporter, they can shape the news in significant ways. To understand how and why fixers shape the news, attention to political, historical, and biographical contexts of newsmaking is essential. The Introduction goes on to explain that the fixer and reporter characters who appear in this book are composite characters created from data collected through ethnographic research.

The Turkish government accelerated its crackdown on the Fethullah Gülen Movement, which had gone from Erdoğan’s key ally to his bitterest foe. The police arrested members of its own force alongside judges, prosecutors, and journalists alleged to be Gülenist conspirators.

Part V will be about change: change in the lives and strategies of our protagonists, change in Turkey and Syria and of international perceptions of those countries, change within the field of journalism, change in the way we should understand who controls the media and how.

For Habib, fixing remained a side hustle to his job as an interpreter for an NGO called Civic Aid that assisted Persian- and Pashto-speaking asylum seekers. He did not think of himself as a journalist or distinguish fixing from other projects in which he functioned as an intercultural broker, as when academics hired him as a research assistant.